Comments on: Entitlement vs. Earning: How to Avoid Harmful Help as a Parent

By: Don’t Feed the Alligators » Blog Archive » Weekly Feeding 5-29-2008

Fri, 30 May 2008 00:56:20 +0000

[...] Little By Little wrote an interesting article on teaching the value of earning money versus being given [...]

By: plonkee

plonkee — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:25:28 +0000

I think the not giving your children anything also causes resentment, and that’s not good. You need to walk in the middle ground, neither giving too much money nor withholding too much. Manual labour is also over-rated as an instiller of a work ethic, all it ever did was make me bored.

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By: CindyS

CindyS — Mon, 26 May 2008 12:04:12 +0000

Letting your children sink or swim on their own doesn’t get easier as they get older. I made my older children save up their money for their first car and pay for their own gas and insurance. They both had part time jobs and rarely ever stayed out sick or called out to play when they were younger. They still maintain that good work ethic. My husband decided that the younger two kids should not have to pay for their own car and he gave them one instead. I can tell a difference in their work ethic. They still work but it is not nearly the same priority because they “know” their father will give them the money for whatever they need. Eventually they are going to have a hard lesson to learn. I see more and more young adults who think that they are entitled to certain things in life and sadly I see more and more parents who are lending or giving them money for things that are not necessities. These same young adults are running up credit card debts because they just don’t have an understanding of what it is going to cost to pay them back.

By: Susan

Susan — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:52:17 +0000

My 16yo just wrecked our car. He was in a rush to get somewhere and hit someone in the back. I had warned him the very same morning to make sure he had plenty of time and not to rush. He felt really bad about the wreck so I told him not to worry we would handle the financial part (our deductible and the ticket). Well my husband was taking him to school two days later and he made a comment that we came out pretty good (the rental car ended up being a high end SUV). It was at that point we realized that he hadn’t learned anything from the wreck. We sat him down and made him responsible for the ticket – $350. He just started a new job and he will be paying us his first three paychecks. Responsibility is good. Once I got over feeling sorry for him I was able to see that he needed to learn from this mistake.